Mathias Goeritz - Abstract Sculpture

"Mathias Goeritz was a German-born Mexican sculptor. He is best known for his interest in what he called “emotional architecture,” which was a belief in objects that elicited an emotional response rather than objects purely for functionality. Goeritz’s public sculptures were often large-scale and inspired by prehistoric cave paintings and monoliths. Born on April 4, 1915 in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland), the artist grew up in Berlin. He went on to study philosophy and the history of art at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, while also studying art under Max Kaus and Hans Orlowski at the Berlin-Charlottenberg School of Arts and Crafts. Goeritz left Germany in 1941 to escape World War II, first settling in Morocco, then Spain, and then in Mexico, where he worked as a teacher. During the 1950s, the artist worked with the architect Luis Barragán to produce massive, abstract concrete sculptures, and Goeritz first presented his “Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional” (“Emotional Architecture Manifesto”). Goeritz’s works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others. He died on August 4, 1990 in Mexico City, Mexico."(artnet)

Ernst Fuchs - Vienna School of Fantastic Realism

Ernst Fuchs (February 13, 1930 – November 9, 2015) was an Austrian painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, singer and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In 1972, he acquired the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in Hütteldorf, which he restored and transformed. The villa was inaugurated as the Ernst Fuchs Museum in 1988.(Wikipedia)
"The universal artist from Vienna, Austria became world famous as graphic artist, painter, sculptor, designer, stage designer, architect, composer and poet. He created a gigantic number of etchings and an equal comprehensive amount of oil paintings and aquarells. In the chapel of parish church St.Egid in Klagenfurt he created monumental frescos to the Apocalypse of John. Beside numerous small-scale sculptures and reliefs Ernst Fuchs created a huge number of life-sized and larger than life-sized sculptures. He designed furniture, tiles, porcelain, jewellery, medallions, tapestry, carpets, fabrics and also costumes and stage decorations for Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, the Magic Flute, Hoffmanns Narratives The Bat and The Golem. Various substantial building projects like a hotel in St. Veit an der Glan or a church at "Thal bei Graz", Austria and a number of glass mosaic fountains were built after his designs. He composed operas and produced a number of records and CD´s. Ernst Fuchs wrote poems, children’s books und fairy-tales, illustrated numerous books, for example, the Bible, and wrote theoretical works about art- and architecture, as well as an autobiography.
He was in contact with important artists of his time like Dali, Hundertwasser and Leonard Bernstein. His undisputed best known work is his own museum; a Villa in Vienna built by Austrian architect Otto Wagner, which he transformed into a fantastic Fuchs museum. Here the visitor will find a representative cross-section of Ernst Fuchs’s work. In the area surrounding the house he created a marvellous sculpture park, where an exceptional well house with basin of a fountain built by the artist out of glass mosaic is situated."(ernstfuchs-zentrum.com)

Tony Smith - Minimalist Sculpture

"Tony Smith (1912-1980) was an American sculptor, architect, and visual artist. Smith is known for his large-scale modular sculptural work and is often regarded as a pioneering figure in minimalist sculpture. After studying architecture at the New Bauhaus in Chicago with László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes and Alexander Archipenko, Smith worked for Frank Lloyd Wright as an office clerk, and then went on to establish his own architectural firm. During the 1960’s Smith was influenced by American Abstract Expressionist artists Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko and became a sculpture. Smith also completed several public commissions, including Light Up (1971), a bright yellow steel structure, and Smug (1973), a sculpture made of plywood triangles connected by hinges. Smith’s work is included in several international collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London." (artproductionfund.org)

Hidetoshi Nagasawa

Hidetoshi Nagasawa (30 October 1940 – 24 March 2018) was a Japanese sculptor and architect, who lived and worked in Italy from 1967 until his death in 2018
"Strongly evocative as well as being of highly symbolic and lyrical value, the works of Hidetoshi Nagasawa (Tonei, 1940) are always intensely permeated with Far Eastern philosophy, thereby leading to research that syncretically combines the spiritual heritage of the East and of the West, filtered through crossreferences and ideas stemming from an experiential and human dimension that he has never disregarded. The artist and his family moved from Manchuria to Japan, and already in the 1950s he became familiar with the various trends in avant-garde art through his contact with the Gutaj group as well as by regularly visiting the independent exhibitions organized by the magazine “Yamiuri.”
Nagasawa arrived in Italy in 1967 and was quickly immersed in a climate of intense artistic fervor, in which he came to know artists such Enrico Castellani, Luciano Fabro, Mario Nigro, Antonio Trotta, Gaetano Ongaro. His training as an architect and a designer, combined with his skills as a sculptor, led to the artist’s extensive and visionary spacialism, which was constantly referring back to the heart of a poetics that consisted of balances and counterpoints, of voids and fulls, of shadows that fade into the direction of a concise, essential, condensed sign that allows for a glimpse of the inner nature of objects. The journey as concrete experience and tòpos of Nagasawa’s exploration takes on the value of a relevant passage of symbolic crossing, the transcending of sign-related and cultural borders, the acknowledgment of what is new through a reading of the known.
The artist’s choice of themes associated with a variety of materials such as wood, iron, wax, paper, bamboo makes tangible the sense of a research that is in constant tension between the visible and the invisible, inclined toward a creative idea which moves from its manual nature to a sensory and eidetic horizon via a pathway strewn with material and immaterial “places,” which Nagasawa puts together in the form of habitats, rooms, doors, walls, gardens, fences, boats, screens.
In 1991 Nagasawa showed at Framart Studio in Naples: on view were hitherto unseen works in marble, iron, wood, bronze and silver, including the work in the collection called In medio virtus: this consists of two marble statues made in 1975 by the Pietrasanta sculptor Gugliemo Antognazzi. As they face each other on two plinths covered with white sheets, they mimic antique marble statues, relating the concept of a space-time that is both mental and physical, as if suspended between them."(madrenapoli.it)